By RHEA-FRANCES TETLEY
Staff Writer
With classic rock playing in the background and a freshly painted interior, the Heart Rock Diner in Valley of Enchantment is attracting many hungry diners and attracting significant amounts of positive, local Facebook buzz. This recently opened restaurant features traditional breakfast and lunch food fare at reasonable prices.
The taste of the food is attracting a lot of attention, too, with a delicious breakfast menu, featuring all the traditional expectations of omelets, waffles, scrambled and fried eggs with bacon, country potatoes, toast and more. The restaurant serves breakfast from 7 a.m. to noon, along with a delicious variety of sandwich lunch menu options being served until 3 p.m. Lunch features delicious French dip and pastrami sandwiches, as well as a selection of burgers and more.
Owner Breann Linville hopes to add a dinner menu in a month or so and extend the restaurant’s hours. Heart Rock Diner is currently closed on Tuesdays.
The Heart Rock Diner is located at 23009 Waters Drive, just half a block off Highway 138, directly across the street from the post office in Crestline’s Valley of Enchantment, about half a mile from the Heart Rock trail at nearby Camp Seely. It offers a cozy dining atmosphere near the local, but well-known attraction, the Heart Rock waterfall.
Breann Linville in her new restaurant, the Heart Rock Diner in Valley of Enchantment.
Proprietor Breann Linville was born and raised in Crestline and loves Valley of Enchantment. When she learned the previous restaurant in that historically favorite restaurant building in V.O.E. was moving out, she immediately jumped on the opportunity to open her own restaurant. Linville has been a waitress for numerous favorite restaurants on the mountain and has been noticing the likes and wants of the local dining clientele. She always has had a desire to make them happy with the food she serves.
“I always wanted to open a restaurant,” Linville said. “My goal is to make the Heart Rock Diner a ‘local’s place,’ with affordable prices and make it feel friendly, welcoming and comfortable, like home, where customers get good food and good prices close to home.”
As a 2004 Rim High School graduate, Linville has over 20 years of experience in serving mountain residents at the Loose Caboose in Top Town Crestline, as well as The Cottage and Osario Bros. in Rimforest and, more recently, at the Bear House and Top Town Café in Crestline. She learned through those years of experience the foods the customers crave, and she has created a menu to meet those wants and desires and has prices that are reasonable.
Linville chose the restaurant’s name to reflect the locale in Valley of Enchantment, near the well-known Heart Rock waterfall and hiking trail, which has been a known attraction for over 110 years, since Camp Seely opened in 1914. The local elementary school has used the hike to the waterfall as an end of the year outing for the fifth-graders for decades. In the restaurant, she has a wooden wall sculpture of the waterfall plus a historic photo of visitors enjoying it from the 1940s, plus other historic photos of the development of the Valley of Enchantment area, some from over 100 years ago.
V.O.E. is a very historic area on the mountain. It was the original location where brothers David and Wellington Seely started the first water-powered sawmill on the mountain in the spring of 1852, beginning the lumber industry on the mountain.
Linville was surprised by the instant, positive reaction, as she tried to quietly open the restaurant on Martin Luther King holiday weekend. When friends discovered the restaurant was finally open, the support from the community was instant from the good will Breann has garnered over the decades. The immediate Internet buzz was that the food was good and reasonably priced. Many customers have already returned several times to sample the many sandwiches, burgers and other foods she is serving. She accepts both cash and credit cards.
The restaurant has comfortable, newly upholstered booths and counter seating. When there is a wait for a table, most of it is done on the front deck, which has seating available.
The menu includes delicious meals with locally reminescent names such as the VOE Breakfast Burrito, The Motor Boat Skillet, the Heart Rock Breakfast, the Redwood Scramble, the 138 Special, Johnny’s Market Roast Beef Sandwiches, the Old Mill Meatball, the VOE Pastrami Sandwich or the Station 28 Burger. They have salad meals and soups of the day. The melts include the Crestline Critter, the Logger’s or Firehouse Melt made of chicken. There is even a Little Hawks menu for those under 12 years of age (referring to the Hawk mascot of VOE Elementary School, just a couple of blocks away).
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